Cod Almighty | Diary

There's a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Mullet's

31 March 2021

BOTB Diary writes: Unusually for this chaotic season, I don’t have a Tuesday night calamity/triumph to remark upon, which is probably for the best anyway. CA employs A Butcher to pick the bones out of the latest lower-division kickfest (see what I did there?) and my commenting on the action is superfluous at best. So here is something else.

Football, as people like to say, is all about opinions. The concept of opinions fascinates me. "Everybody is allowed an opinion" has been transformed by the internet age into "facts don't matter anymore, choose your own reality." There is a Dilbert book called When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View? a phrase which neatly encapsulates this disturbing new concept.

Matters of pure opinion are which William D Drake album is the best*, which flower has the nicest scent, who is the most handsome of the Hollywood Hunks, or who is the unfunniest out of Hale and Pace. These are matters in which there is no empirical evidence. Your own individual perception creates an opinion.

In football it is still about opinions, but it becomes more complicated. Is the best striker the one who scores the most goals in the fewest appearances, or someone who provides the most assists, or someone who works hardest for the team? Is the best goalkeeper the one with the most clean sheets? Is the best manager the one with the most promotions under his belt, or the fewest relegations?

The problem is that with so many variables dreadful and unpleasant things like mathematics have to be introduced. Is a player who scores two goals in four appearances better than someone who scores in ten out of twenty-one? His ratio is better, after all. Similarly, is three in ten in the old fourth division less worthy than two out of ten in the old third? Be careful considering these matters: this is Vorderman country. Objective success is a terribly hard thing to gauge in a team sport.

I've asked before – come on, you must remember, it was only a year ago - about which characteristics people use to choose their own favourite player. Then, I decided that the very sixties/seventies concept of "coolness" was the key. I now believe that your favourite players are the ones who embody the way you believe you would play if you were out there.

The oft-chosen Bobby Cumming for example – there is no doubt that he was a good player, but his most positive characteristic in the eyes of many fans was that he fought for one-eyed football justice. If one of our players was kicked, say, by the opposition's number 10, everywhere Bobby went he would hear supporters shouting out the number of the miscreant. "Number 10, Bobby, sort him out!" In a way he was not so much a footballer as a superhero, righting wrongs and restoring order via chaos. Isn't that how we all saw ourselves growing up?

Paul Futcher - fabulous player – had the air of Gandalf, Dumbledore, or Sherlock Holmes: a kind of ancient wise owl infallibility normally only found in fictional characters and religious texts. You wouldn't be surprised to find out that if he was paired with a younger centre-half he would call him "grasshopper" throughout the 90 minutes. Chris Nicholl was a fantastic centre-half who is rarely mentioned in favourite player polls, doubtless because he had a cheerful, unpretentious, boxer-nosed everyman attitude that was harder for some to aspire to.

My own favourite, Clive Mendonca, not only scored goals, he did it in a calm, cool way, without sulking, diving or general shithousery. He was the Man With No Name, riding into town, shooting a hat-trick of holes into Brentford's defence then disappearing into the sunset without saying a word. Just like I would if I had his talent. I imagine. Ahem.

Being very old I sometimes hear the younger kids talking about Town players of the past and not quite getting it right. Steve Livingstone for example. Livvo is now treated as a bit of Town legend, and rightly so. But, I was there, and the way he was talked about in the Pontoon was often not complimentary. Indeed, he was often considered the outlier in a Buckley team of small to medium size men who ran about a lot – Buckley’s one concession to traditional lower-league football. He may even have occasionally been compared to various farmyard animals popular in the football parlance of the time, or sneered at for his lack of finesse. When he once scored a 30-yard worldie in a pre-season friendly everybody's first reaction was to laugh rather than applaud. But looking back – what a man!

And Rob Jones! I distinctly remember when Jones was brought in, seeing this gangly defender with the physical characteristics of a windmill having a nervous breakdown, and wondering what on earth was going on in Slade's head that he thought this monstrosity was ever going to be a professional footballer. After a very poor start he improved dramatically and achieved lower-division hero status of the kind enjoyed by Keith Alexander – we knew he was a great at the level we were at, but doubted he'd ever play that much higher. Michael Reddy was a wondrous player but not often quoted as a favourite– was his hair just a little bit mullety for the time? That kind of thing counts against you.

So where is all this leading? Nowhere, but it has saved me going on about how much I hate rich men's plaything clubs like Salford and how much I hope we stuff them on Good Friday, even though we most probably won't. And it took my mind off this season and put me into happier times.

*I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "it's got to be Revere Reach, hasn't it? But no. You're quite foolish to think that. It's Briny Hooves.